


One day the air all turned to glass.

by vtn



Category: Matthew Good Band
Genre: M/M, Stream of Consciousness
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2006-04-08
Updated: 2006-04-08
Packaged: 2017-11-11 11:57:51
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,139
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/478312
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/vtn/pseuds/vtn
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>One day the air all turned to glass (a manifesto.  (Days like that usually happen when no one's looking.))</p>
            </blockquote>





	One day the air all turned to glass.

Manifesto.

This is a story with pictures, because it might be kind of confusing without them.   Now you can look at the pictures instead of reading the story, and save a good ten minutes of your life!   Now you can’t blame that mean old Matthew Good for wasting your valuable time.   I left the story here in case you want to read it, but it really isn’t necessary.   

Honestly, it’s not.

This is a map of the world.   This story takes place in Canada. 

_One day the air all turned to glass._

One day the air all turned to glass. 

Days like that usually happen when no one’s looking.   You wake up and all of a sudden the world is different, and it occurs to you that someone's played a trick on you and you’re walled up in a cell of frozen oxygen, the carbon dioxide you’re respiring out having burned a surprisingly box-shaped area around you.   And so after you wipe the drool off your face, you push around on the walls for a while, and you find that they’re not going anywhere, so instead you read a magazine.

I was reading my magazine and I started wondering how long those walls were going to stick around and whether they wanted a cup of coffee.   Well, I didn’t have a cup of coffee, so I told them they were just going to have to deal.   Life is like that, sometimes.   You just have to deal.

When you think about it, everything is cyclic, which means the furthest place from me on the Earth is right behind me.   Or behind a glass wall.

For instance, the furthest place down in the world is the Marianas Trench.   I know this because it said so in my magazine, which was a _National Geographic_.   My first memory of _National Geographic_ was on a school camping trip when some of the other boys brought one in to look at the pictures of naked African women.   They all thought they were so lucky to have that; they never found out I’d smuggled in a good old-fashioned _Playboy_.   Everyone always thinks they’re smart for their accomplishments before they compare them to someone else’s, don’t they?   

(I know I do.   You probably do too.   I wouldn't sweat it.   Your accomplishments are very important and if you hadn't taken care of them we would have to ship someone else out to do them, and our operations would be all clogged up with the appropriate measures to punish you in the first place.   (If you haven't caught on yet, this is a joke.   You can laugh now.))

My encyclopedia says the Marianas Trench is a good 35,000 feet deep and the US Navy sent two people down there in 1960.   My encyclopedia didn't mention anything about glass walls. 

Anyway, the furthest place down in the world is the Marianas Trench, and if it weren’t for those glass walls, the quickest route to the Marianas Trench would, of course, be _up_.   Unfortunately, there are glass walls above me all the time, so I can’t walk up the sky into the bottom of the Marianas Trench.   I guess maybe I should be thankful for that, because I’d be under miles of water, and I don’t have gills.   Although maybe without the walls, we’d all develop gills in case we accidentally walked into the bottom of the ocean because we were trying to touch the sky.

Maybe that’s me, right there, that man who’s crazy enough to think that if he keeps cycling around the great treadmill that is the world, eventually he’ll touch the sky and it will be sweet and sharp and blue like colored marzipan.

The sky that day was sunny with some clouds, like in this picture. 

I read _National Geographic_ and wondered if maybe the furthest distance in the world, by extension, was the distance between you and someone you’re touching.

Then I strained against the glass walls some more, and Dave Genn pulled me out of the shower and asked me was I okay and mothership to Matt you’re going to wake up everyone within a five mile radius banging on the shower like that and I said okay and I sat down on the floor and I think we were _both_ wondering why I had showered in my T-shirt and boxers.

It was actually very funny, I realized.

“This is funny, isn’t it?”   I said faintly as I started to make a puddle around me and the H2O started to burn away at the glass walls.   “You’re always blaming me for being too serious, but I think this is actually pretty funny.”

“It’s always actually funny, Matt; the question is why aren’t you laughing?”

“It’s not funny to me.”

“It’s _never_ funny to you.   Do you get a kick out of that?   You like being the one who’s smart enough to get how nothing is funny?”

This actually was funny enough to make me laugh, so I did.

“Fair enough,” said Dave.   “You’re laughing either because you think it’s funny how pathetically stupid I am, or because you think it’s funny how pathetically stupid _you_ are.”

“I think the fact that I’m sitting on the floor in a puddle of water and you’re standing up looking down at me even though I’m taller than you should tell you which one I’m laughing at.”   Dave’s shoulders dropped.   

“It’s too early for this.   Just shut up for a while, will you?"

I hung my head and did as I was told.   

� 

This picture shows someone swimming.   That’s important later in the story.   Pat yourself on the back; you’re ahead of the game now! 

One of the great questions everyone asks about the human race is: is our great failure the fact that we have a tendency to hang our heads and do as we are told if someone is bigger and stronger than us, or is it the fact that there are a few of us who just didn’t get the evolutionary wiring to hang their heads and do as they were told?   Natural selection says they should get wiped out, but we never do; well, _we_ do, but humans have that troublesome tradition of history and so someone remembers us.   

(In the interest of having someone remember me, I didn't just hang my head and do as I was told; I also wrote a paragraph about it.   Go figure.)

“Dave, I need some coffee.”

“I know.”   Dave went into the kitchen, and I watched the way the light from the kitchen windows made diamonds at the thinnest part of his waist.   I watched the way he carved his own image out of infinite sheets of glass air.   If I had been any more awake, I probably would have thought it was funny how he could walk through the glass air and I couldn’t.   Instead, I thought it was funny how he could make me a cup of coffee in my own kitchen, and I couldn’t.   But maybe that’s the same thing.

There were towels in the kitchen too, and Dave brought some along with the coffee.   It was eight in the morning, and we were still asleep.   It was almost like we had left our souls in bed and there were just two effigies of us having coffee and towels.

The hot coffee mug was fusing with my hands and I asked how did it work and Dave said you idiot it’s instant coffee how do you think it works haven’t you ever actually noticed what things are in your own kitchen and I said probably not.

I had my coffee in a mug, not a martini glass, but there’s no mug picture so you’ll have to extrapolate. 

We tend to communicate like that.   I ask the wrong questions and he gives the wrong answers.   Somehow it all works out, most of the time.

Dave sat down in the puddle of floor and water and melted glass with me.

“Matt,” he said and his voice spread along the glass walls, coating them with gold and turning them into amber.

“That’s the name, don’t wear it out.”

“Matt, I want you to come over here when you finish that coffee.”   I poured the coffee onto the floor.   It seemed like the thing to do at the time.

“Finished,” I said and I smiled to hold my face together.

“Right,” and some pieces of Dave’s face were coming loose, too.

This picture is a police car.   Kind of like an ambulance, its main purpose is taking longer than a taxi or a pizza delivery truck to get to your house if something is wrong with you.   I guess that's all okay, though, since I'd rather have a pizza than an ambulance whenever _I'm_ feeling down.

Oh, if you're wondering about the swimming, it's in this next part.

I came over to where he was sitting and stood there, looking down at him and feeling like I was standing on the diving board, which was rocking back and forth as I was deciding whether to jump off.   It wasn’t the deep water I was worried about; it was how every time I jumped off the diving board I would hit the water in the wrong way and it would feel like a sheet of glass before it shattered all over me.

“Idiot,” said Dave, and I decided that was a very good description.   He grabbed me by my pants leg and pulled me down onto the floor and into his lap, which would have been awkward but, juxtaposed with the current situation, wasn’t really.   I closed my eyes.

“What’s wrong with you,” said Dave.   Dave said what’s wrong with you like it was a statement.

“There's nothing wrong with me?" I said like it was a question.   It didn't seem good enough, so I added, "Everything's wrong with me?"

“Sure.”   Dave laughed.   It bounced off the glass walls and came back canned like we were on a sitcom.   “Seriously, what’s wrong with you?”

“I’m no one,” I said.   Dave grabbed my shoulders and looked into my eyes.   It was easy to avoid his gaze because I was on the other side of a glass wall, at the furthest point away from him in the world.

“ _What_ did you _do_ last night.”   Another statement.

For your information, this is what I, Matthew F. R. Good, did last night: “Last night Matthew F. R. Good took his sleeping pills and went to bed.   He had also taken some pain medicine that didn’t go well with the sleeping pills, and he had strange dreams.   At one point he called David Genn and got the answering machine.   He left a message that consisted of one minute of silence.   After that, he left the phone on the hook and fell asleep on the floor.   He woke up and got in the shower because he was trying to clear his mind, and in the shower he started having another dream, one about the air turning into glass walls, and thought it was real.   That’s when David Genn, who had come to Matthew F. R. Good’s house to check on him because he got the message and was worried about Matthew F. R. Good, found him in the shower with his clothes on, beating on the tiles.”

This is what came out of Matthew F. R. Good’s mouth, that poor fool: “Un.”   That mouth was my mouth.

This is a phone like the one I called at Dave Genn's house, with an answering machine like the one I left him a message on even though I had nothing much to say. 

I had to look at Dave’s eyes then.   They were red.

Dave’s hands were in my hair, touching my skull through my skin.   I thought about phrenology, and wondered if Dave knew everything about me now because he knew the shape of my skull.   I wondered if he could read it like a book.   

“Do you know anything about phrenology?” I asked him.

“What the hell's that?” said Dave.   So I was safe, I thought, until I remembered that Dave knew everything about me anyway.   Instead of giving him an answer, I kissed him, and coffee stains spread across my knees.

I don’t know when I started dreaming again, but I remember dreaming that all the glass walls between everything turned to sand, the universe was a beach, and everything was touching everything, like a system of equations with infinite solutions.

The universe is a beach.   Aloha! 

Most of this really happened.   Except for the glass walls.   I made those up. 

�

I like to make things up.   I'm a writer.   It's what we do. 

This is what writing is like sometimes. 

This is what happens to me when I _don’t_ write. 

**Author's Note:**

> AMS  
> September 21, 2006  
> Finalized April 8, 2007
> 
>  ~~This is a tribute to the Webdings font.~~ This was my attempt at doing an outtake from the "Manifestos" section on the old Matthew Good Band website. The real thing, for comparison, can be found at [Disorientation](http://mattgood.imgarbage.com/manifestos.php), or in [at last there is nothing left to say](http://www.amazon.com/Last-There-Nothing-Left-Say/dp/189466308X/ref=sr_1_1?ie=UTF8&qid=1344182245&sr=8-1&keywords=at+last+there+is+nothing+left+to+say) if you like giving your money to writers who are better than me in order to read their books.


End file.
